France: A license to kill

It was March 19, 2012, and as students gathered for morning prayers at Ozar Hatorah school in Paris, news spread that an Islamist terrorist had attacked this school in Toulouse, murdering a teacher, his two young sons, ages three and five, and an eight-year-old girl.

“Some people came into the synagogue and said that we had to lock ourselves in a safe place because they didn’t know if other schools would be attacked,” recalls Murciano, today president of the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF).

“The day after, we already had the army and police protecting our school. After that, I can hardly remember a moment when there was no police or army in front of Jewish schools and religious institutions.”

For Murciano’s generation, armed guards, security barriers, and military patrols were not extraordinary measures. They were part of everyday Jewish life. That reality shaped his understanding of Jewish identity.

“My relationship with antisemitism is first of all that of protection,” he says. “As a young, proud Jew, it was important that I engage in the protection of my family and community.”

FOR MUCH of the Jewish world, October 7 represented a dramatic rupture. For French Jews, it felt more like the latest chapter in a story they had been living for decades.

France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, estimated at between 450,000 and 500,000 people. It has also, unfortunately, become the continent’s most significant testing ground for modern antisemitism.

Between 2003 and 2017, 12 Jews were murdered in France because they were Jewish. According to a 2025 report by the Jewish Community Protection Service (SPCJ), the Jewish community’s security organization, 1,320 antisemitic incidents were recorded last year, including 126 physical assaults.

Although Jews constitute less than one percent of France’s population, they account for 53% of all anti-religious hate incidents in the country.

The SPCJ described the phenomenon as “daily, durable, established, widespread throughout French territory, and increasingly violent.”

The days when Jews elsewhere spoke admiringly of being “happy as the Jews in France” are long gone.

“I lost my illusions with the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000,” says Yonathan Arfi, the president of the CRIF – the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions. “In the 1990s, we had dozens of antisemitic incidents each year. From 2000 onward, we had hundreds. Since 2023, we have had thousands.”

The trajectory, he says, has fundamentally altered Jewish perceptions of France. “Previously, antisemitism existed but was ashamed and hidden. Today, it is proud and embraced. That’s a new condition.”

Arfi believes France experienced this transformation earlier than much of the rest of the West.

“In France, the new antisemitism struck very early and most strongly,” he says. “While in other European countries Jews see the point of rupture on October 7, for the French Jewish community, it was October 2000.”

He points to a succession of traumatic milestones: the kidnapping and torture of Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse school massacre, the Hypercacher attack, and the murders of Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll.

“For a long time, the emergence of this murderous antisemitism was a French specificity,” Arfi says. “France was, to a certain extent, the laboratory for the new antisemitism. I hope that France will also be a laboratory for finding responses to confront it.”

Part of the explanation, Arfi believes, lies in France’s unique social landscape.

France absorbed large Jewish communities fleeing persecution in North Africa and the Middle East after World War II. At the same time, it became home to one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations, many arriving from former French colonies.

“The existence of tensions and identity complexities connected to the history of colonization, mainly in Algeria, created complicated relations between Jews, Arabs, and French society,” Arfi explains. “Earlier than elsewhere, the logic of victimhood competition was established.”

Compounding these tensions, France also experienced Islamist terrorism before most of Europe. “More terrorist attacks were executed here than elsewhere in Europe,” he says.

FRENCH HISTORIAN Georges Bensoussan was born 74 years ago in Morocco and, as a child, moved with his family to France. He lives in a Parisian neighborhood that saw its Jewish population replaced by a Muslim one. He rejects the notion that today’s antisemitism is fundamentally different from what came before.

“It is wrong to say that there is a new antisemitism,” Bensoussan says. “Antisemitism, with all its facets, has a common structure. It puts on different faces, but the root is the same: the detestation of the Jew.”

What has changed, he argues, is the disappearance of shame.

“What is striking since October 7 is the liberation of antisemitic speech,” Bensoussan continues. “Five years ago, it was still shameful to use such a discourse. Today it is OK. It is not even under the cover of anti-Zionism. It is pure antisemitism.”

Continuity, rather than innovation, is what he calls this phenomenon.

“In the past, Jews were accused of deicide. Today, they are accused of genocide. It is the same old antisemitic matrix and pattern.”

The charge itself, he notes, predates Israel’s current war. “The accusation of genocide didn’t start with October 7; it started in 1948,” Bensoussan continues. “However, October 7 completely liberated the antisemitic speech.”

“The current surge caused the fall of moral censorship,” he says. “History shows that every time we had a surge of antisemitism, it created a chain reaction.”

The language of anti-Israel activism has increasingly become a social marker: “This language today consists of the detestation of Israel, but once you scratch it a bit, you discover the detestation of the Jew.”

Returning to Paris during the early 2000s, she observed growing hostility even within progressive spaces.

“The atmosphere was so antisemitic and anti-Zionist that Jews who wanted to demonstrate against the war felt they couldn’t go there,” she recalls. “Something happened then.”

According to Cohen-Solal, the distinction between Jews and Zionists has steadily collapsed.

“Today the word Zionist has become a curse,” said Cohen-Solal. “Before, people made some distinction between the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist.’ Today, most of them don’t. Obviously, nowadays people say ‘Zionist’ to avoid saying ‘Jew.’”

Imported narratives, she argues, have found fertile ground. “Those who use it repeat a propagandist language in which Zionists and Jews are the same and represent evil. ‘It is because of the Jews that there are wars.’”

At the same time, she offers a more nuanced view of France itself.

“The government is present and very clear on what it says against antisemitism,” she says. “The situation is complicated, but I would still say that life here for a Jew can be calm.”

Then she pauses.

“But where can we go? That’s the question that all French Jews ask themselves.”

ONE OF those who chose to confront the problem politically is Caroline Yadan, a member of the French National Assembly representing French citizens living abroad, including approximately 150,000 of them who reside in Israel.

Following the explosion of antisemitism after October 7, Yadan introduced legislation targeting contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, including glorifying terrorism, legitimizing terrorist acts, denying the Holocaust, and calling for the destruction of recognized states.

The proposal ultimately failed.

“Since I became an MP, because of my very clear positions on antisemitism and Israel, I was a target of pure antisemitic insults, threats, harassment, and attacks,” Yadan says. “My bill made it 100 times worse.”

For Yadan, October 7 transformed the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

“Already before that, we had 12 murders of French Jews because they were Jews,” she says. Then came October 7, which was like a pressure cooker exploding. “All the antisemitic rot that grew under the surface used this tragedy as a pretext to become audible and banalized.”

What particularly horrified her was the celebration of Hamas’s crimes.

“The particularity of October 7 is that, unlike the Nazis, who hid their crimes, Hamas filmed everything and broadcast it live. They presented their crimes as being just and legitimate,” Yadan continues. “It was as if a Pandora’s box was opened and erased all the taboos that were created after the Shoah.”

Those defending Jews, she says, increasingly find themselves accused rather than supported.

“Those defending the Jews are immediately accused of being genocidal. They are boycotted. They are harassed. A fear is installed,” Yadan says. “It is as if a license to kill, a permission to commit the irreparable, has been given.”

“Then, mainly among the radical Left, there was a discourse which consisted of an accusatory reversal, aiming at legitimizing the pogrom of October 7,” Yadan adds.

“They said: ‘It’s resistance, therefore it’s legitimate.’ This is what I call a license to kill, a license to do the worst and say the worst. There was a feeling that people were waiting for this to happen.”

“Those who give a license to kill Jews are, on one hand, the Islamists and, on the other hand, the anti-Zionists, who are coming mainly from the radical Left,” Arfi of the CRIF agrees.

“Then you have the conspiracy theories, which are galvanized by the social networks. There, you see old dynamics of antisemitic prejudices finding a new force and touching a large young public,” he says.

“You have three parts of the society where the antisemitic prejudices are very high today: the French identifying themselves as Muslims who are targeted by Islamist ideologies, the French of the radical Left who follow an anti-Zionist program, and the youth,” Arfi notes.

“Unfortunately, the spread of antisemitic prejudices and the Palestinian question became a cultural norm among them, which is very difficult to confront.”

MURCIANO SEES the same process unfolding on university campuses.

“In recent years, antisemitism in France changed,” he says. “It is much more accepted within society.”

Messages demanding that “Zionists get out of our campus” have become increasingly commonplace.

“Before, they shouted: ‘Jews out.’ Now, they shout: ‘Zionists out,’” Murciano explains. “It is the same spirit.”

Students are expected to publicly distance themselves from Israel. “The idea is that you can’t be a good Jew if you don’t disconnect yourself entirely from Israel.”

Even Jews deeply critical of Israeli governments, he notes, increasingly feel surrounded by antisemitism.

For Arfi, anti-Zionism becomes antisemitic when it denies Jews rights afforded to every other people.

“After the creation of the State of Israel, being anti-Zionist means refusing to recognize that the Jews have the right to self-determination,” Arfi says. “It is a way of discriminating against Jews.”

He warns of what happens when anti-Zionism becomes institutionalized.

“You can’t imagine a serene and durable Jewish life in a country that will be radically anti-Zionist. When anti-Zionism becomes a political and social norm, the air becomes suffocating for Jews.”

Yet, he rejects simplistic comparisons with the 1930s. “In the 1930s, you had state antisemitism. This is definitely not the case today,” Arfi says. “The state tries to combat antisemitism. Not enough, not efficiently, but it tries.”

He still believes France’s future remains undetermined.

“I hope that in France there exists a huge majority that refuses to give the keys of power to an antisemitic radical Left.”

HISTORY, HOWEVER, urges caution.

“The political polarization benefits both the extreme Right and the extreme Left,” he says. “There is still antisemitism on the extreme Right. There is a very strong antisemitism on the radical Left, and there is Islamist antisemitism.”

The challenge – hatred often speaks louder than solidarity does.

“The tragedy of our times is that the Jews never had so many enemies within French society since the Shoah,” Arfi says. “But at the same time, maybe they never had so many friends. However, our enemies are very vocal, and our friends are often too silent.”

Murciano shares that cautious determination.

As president of an organization born from the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, he believes French Jews are rediscovering instincts many hoped had become unnecessary.

“We are witnessing a return to a Jewish combative identity in this period,” he says. “Everywhere it is difficult to be Jewish today. We have to prepare the Jews wherever they are to return to a Jewish condition marked by the Jewish identity of combat.”

Then, he offers a glimpse into what that preparation looks like.

For generations after the Holocaust, many Jews believed they had finally secured their place within Western democracies.

For French Jews, that certainty has eroded.

The question confronting them is no longer whether antisemitism exists. It is whether democratic societies possess the confidence and moral clarity to confront it before it becomes normalized beyond repair.